Salam attended the Government College at Lahore, and in 1952 he received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge. He returned to Pakistan as a professor of mathematics in 1951–54 and then went back to Cambridge as a lecturer in mathematics. He became professor of theoretical physics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, in 1957. Salam was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim scientist to win a Nobel Prize. In 1964 he helped found the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy, in order to provide support for physicists from Third World countries. He served as the centre’s director until his death.

Salam carried out his Nobel Prize–winning research at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in the 1960s. His hypothetical equations, which demonstrated an underlying relationship between the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force, postulated that the weak force must be transmitted by hitherto-undiscovered particles known as weak vector bosons, or W and Z bosons. Weinberg and Glashow reached a similar conclusion using a different line of reasoning. The existence of the W and Z bosons was eventually verified in 1983 by researchers using particle accelerators at CERN.

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...forces in nature (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) as manifestations of a grand unified theory (GUT). The first step in this direction was taken during the 1960s by Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg, and Sheldon Glashow, who formulated the electroweak theory, which combines the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. This theory predicted that the weak...

...different subatomic particles and then identify for the known forces the messenger particles required by fields with the chosen symmetry. Early in the 1960s Sheldon Glashow in the United States and Abdus Salam and John Ward in England decided to work with a combination of two symmetry groups—namely, SU(2) × U(1). Such a symmetry requires four spin-1 messenger particles, two...

...step was the discovery that a gauge-invariant quantum field theory of the weak force had to include an additional interaction—namely, the electromagnetic interaction. Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg independently proposed a unified “electroweak” theory of these forces based on the exchange of four particles: the photon for electromagnetic...

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(1926-96). Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam was born in Jhang Maghiana. He was a corecipient of the 1979 Nobel prize in physics for his contributions to theories on the fundamental interactions of particles. Salam formulated the electroweak theory unifying electromagnetic and weak interactions into one basic interaction, the electroweak force. He also suggested a theory unifying strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. Salam was a lecturer at Cambridge University from 1954 to 1956, before becoming a professor at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. He was also the director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy for many years. (See also physics.)